


Ghosts of Shells

by WInger



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Brothers, Dark, Dark Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Romance, Surrealism, ghost story, suspended disbelief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 10:12:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15705153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WInger/pseuds/WInger
Summary: Takashi Shirogane comes back to Earth. Adam can’t bring himself to believe it.---He’s just about run out of adrenaline and was starting to shake from overexertion, but regardless, he wanted to quietly observe the heroes who had finally come home from their legendary intergalactic battles. To the small number of people who’d been intimately close with them before they left Earth, they felt more like spirits returning from beyond the grave.---Trigger warning for mild depression and mild suicidal theme.





	Ghosts of Shells

He’d quit the Garrison. He’d been disgusted, but not surprised, at how quickly the state media had turned around to blame Earth’s best pilot as the sole reason behind the Kerberos mission failure. But as someone on the inside, the stench of the cover-up had been unbearable. The higher-ups shuffled around like they had their balls tied together, and the information surrounding the mission was covered in so much red tape that he was continuously denied clearance, even as both the surviving fiancé and the planet’s next best pilot. He stayed for three months, which turned out to be three months too long, and when he eventually turned his resignation in, his CO had the gall to offer condolences. _Fuck you_ , Adam had said, showing himself out the door.

The only other person who’d been as outraged as him was Keith. They kept in regular contact even as he moved out of the Garrison for some place far, far away, but truth to be told he’d been fed up, and when Keith told him of his plans to drop out of school to investigate the conspiracy full-time he hadn’t tried very hard to talk him out of it. He was still reeling from a breakup that had been bad enough even before it developed so many layers of complications, and in a bid to find some breathing space he’d physically distanced himself from all people. It had been selfish, yes. Had it also been much needed? Yes. 

Then Keith disappears off the face of Earth exactly a year after Takashi had gone, in circumstances far worse and much more mysterious. In the same night, an alien spacecraft crashed onto Earth, three other Garrison cadets went MIA, there was an unnatural explosion in the mountain range next to the Garisson, and footage of a second UFO moving impossible speeds had been recorded flying through a wormhole in Earth’s own atmosphere. Tying all of these disparate events together was the name _Takashi Shirogane,_ blipping across all the government’s top-secret radars that Adam had been tapping into, as well as in the voice message Keith left for him, containing his final words, _I think Shiro’s back, I’m going to find him._ As though one disembodied spirit had been responsible for all of that incomprehensible chaos.

In the first year, after Takashi, his biggest motivators had been confusion, frustration, and grief. By the second year, after Keith _,_ all of that had turned into regret. He lost weight, sleep, and friends in his depraved, never-ending search for information. There was a period when he thought the well had finally run dry – when he could no longer find anything new, when all the questions he could think of had been asked and answered repeatedly to no avail. He woke up one morning feeling like it was the last morning, again, and caught himself staring a hole at his reflection through the mirror, so gaunt and tired-looking and _old,_ trying to recall at what point he’d traded his sanity in exchange for a puzzle of clues on his wall that was always close to, yet never at a resolution. Wasn’t he supposed to have come out here for closure?

There’s a gun beneath the pillow next to him on the bed, locked and loaded for a number of reasons. There were things in his information that hinted at a race of advanced, hostile aliens out there in deep space. More than once he’s gone to sleep with his fingers wrapped around the handle - it gives him comfort, even though sometimes when he closes his eyes he’s entertaining the thought of not waking up ever again. 

All of a sudden there’s a sharp rap on his door, giving him pause. His slides his eyes to the entrance, but tells himself he must be imagining it. Not many knew of his whereabouts, and nobody would trek through this desert without contacting him first through digital means. 

There’s a rap on his door again, sharper. And this time, this interruption is what saves his soul, because he gets up and goes to get it. He opens the door only to find, of all things, the ghost of Samuel Holt waiting there for him.

It’s an unexpected sight and panic wells up inside of him. He must be dreaming, because the alternative was- and it couldn’t be- he wouldn’t have done it- no- he told himself _not yet_ \- The alternative was that he must be dead too, because how else could he be looking at _Sam Holt_ , the mission commander who’d been eviscerated in the fatal crash on Kerberos two years ago? He looked thinner than Adam remembered, frailer, but also rejuvenated _,_ and when Sam Holt reaches out to grab him, his hold is firm and solid. He holds up a photo of a healthy-looking man beaming at the camera, unrecognizably familiar, and all Sam Holt says to him is that “ _He’s alive_.”

It’s only two words and a single photo, but it causes him so much pain that Adam realizes he, too, must still be alive. 

After that he’s revitalized, more or less, as Sam tells him everything he knew about the aliens, war, magic, and a gigantic robot machine formed of five smaller lion robot machines fighting for the liberation of the universe against other robot machines created by a race of evil alien colonizers. With all the photo and video evidences he’d brought back with him, Adam trusts Sam, even though to him his tale was as unbelievable as the pain in his chest was tangible. Nevertheless Adam cooperates, and together they reach out to the families of the MIA cadets, negotiates working terms with the insufferable government, and work out some kind of defense strategy with the resources thoughtfully provided by Sam’s two genius children – both very much still alive – against the increasing signs of an approaching alien invasion.

That's how _four years_ go by. Sometimes the time gone feels like the blink of an eye; other times it felt like four decades. If Adam had been privately skeptical Sam’s state of mind, and doubting himself every single day for operating once again under the guise of hope, all of that was laid to rest the instant the first alien warship reached Earth. It was a single carrier ship that released a thousand small, fast and angry fighters into Earth’s skies. As he strapped into his own fighter, ready as ever, he couldn’t help reflecting that he’d genuinely wanted that _Voltron_ machine to arrive first. By the way and rate at which things were unfolding, it seemed more likely that he would be the one to lose his life before whatever potential reunion (he'd been unable to stop fantasizing) with that scumbag ex of his could even take place.

The enemy had ten thousand years of experience attacking and colonizing new planets, but Earth’s defense forces were reasonably well-prepared and he was certain their war strategies were taking the enemy by surprise. By the courtesy of Katie Holt, they had been able to study videos of the individual Lion machines fighting the alien jets, and while Adam didn’t have anything as powerful or capable as that, he was confident that he could fly and strategize on par with at least one of its Paladins.

It was hard to gauge their side’s progress in the middle of a dogfight, but he was pleased with the number of kills he’d made, inasmuch as he felt like he’d been riding around on a whole lot of luck. Eventually an enemy laser clips one of his wings, and he wrestled against gravity to get as far away from the battlefield as possible in order to safely eject. He made it out alive but injured, with an adrenaline-fueled hyperawareness of his surroundings, taking a moment to steel himself to the pain and observing the battleground. And what a surreal sight it was. A blinding flash of light appears overhead like a second sun, accompanied by a sudden electrical charge in the air. Numerous laser beams spiral across the sky and takes downs thirty enemy jets simultaneously. A monstrous robot falls from the clouds, wielding a jagged sword as long as its body that it uses to effortlessly cleave the alien carrier into two. The resulting explosion takes out another good chunk of the enemy’s fighters in the air.

Its timely appearance most definitely changed the tide of the battle into Earth’s favor, but if Adam wanted to celebrate this victory, he had to first make it back to the Garrison. He’d made good distance in his jet and the base wasn’t too far away, but now his challenge is to traverse active warzone with multiple fractures on his left side. By the time he gets there, the fight had been well and truly won. The _Voltron_ robot had landed at the mouth of the base, and a sea of uniformed officials had gathered at its feet, presumably around its pilots. The direction he was coming from put him to the right side of all the commotion. Even from this distance he could make out the top of Sam Holt’s white hair, alongside his wife, both in tight embrace with a smaller figure outfitted in the Green Paladin uniform.

He comes to a stop at a point where he deduces that he was far enough to see, but not close enough to be seen. He’s just about run out of adrenaline and was starting to shake from overexertion, but regardless, he wanted to quietly observe the heroes who had finally come home from their legendary intergalactic battles. To the small number of people who’d been intimately close with them before they left Earth, they felt more like spirits returning from beyond the grave.

With so much bureaucracy between him and them, he’s certain he’s invisible. He could identify those in the Paladin uniforms easily enough, and the Black one was Takashi without a doubt, exuding confidence and authority from his side. But in person, so many things about him were different than what Adam had been expecting to see. Instead of the black prosthetic limb he’d had in the videos, he was completely missing a right arm. More so than his fringe, his entire head and eyebrows had been bleached a shocking silvery white. The scar across his nose seemed much bigger, and was the loudest, clearest indicator of the number of dangerous fights and close calls he must have been in.

His heart swells with the realization that he’d correctly anticipated Takashi changing into something different and foreign – into this strange, ghostly figure in white. There’s a mixing pot of disbelief and denial churning low in his gut, but really, it’s a grave he’d been burying himself in for six years - when he told Takashi to leave and he did, and then went on to conflate the end of a relationship with a lover to that of the death of his best friend and flight partner.

Maybe that person in his line of sight wasn’t even real; if he’s feeling so close to passing out he could be hallucinating, his brain conjuring up a fantasy image of a man he used to know for his deepest desires. God knows he'd been out in the desert long enough to experience that several times. He’d been so hung up over the idea of getting to see Takashi Shirogane again, now that the moment had arrived, all seemed distorted and suspicious to him.

Somehow or the other, even though he couldn’t possibly have known, Takashi turns in his direction and looks straight at him. From this angle, his in-control aura seemed to vanish. His eyes looked hesitant, unsure of what to do about the distance between them. The emotions in them were so raw, for a moment all the noisy thoughts in Adam’s head cleared as he stares back, entertaining the terrifying notion that Takashi was alive, battle worn but well, and had been thinking of him.

The Red Paladin, who’s actually nearer to Adam, notices the distraction and turns similarly. His mouth opens in surprise, and his eyes widen, darting left and right between Takashi and him. “Adam _?_ ” Keith calls. It’s yet another familiar voice, one that he had also been hoping to hear once more, and it breaks the strange spell that had momentarily come over him. He lifts his gaze from Takashi's. 

He could feel his heart jack-hammering, which couldn’t be a good thing for his current state. Nevertheless, he finds the energy to lift one arm in greeting as Keith approaches, hugging him carefully on his undamaged side. The kid had grown taller, broader, and was sporting some sort of birthmark-cut on the bottom of his face. “Keith,” he tries to say, voice barely coming out. He’s reminded afresh of the last time he heard and seen of Keith before he’d left like Takashi Shirogane had, and he finds himself feeling winded mentally on top of all his physical injuries. “You _punk_ ,” Adam tells him, closing his eyes and hugging him back as fiercely as he could.

“You don’t seem too good,” Keith says, voice thick, finally pulling apart and looking at him in concern. “What happened?”

He assumes Keith means his somewhat obvious injuries, and not the broken heart he’d been so carelessly hiding. “Got ejected from my fighter. I’ll be fine. You should go, they’re waiting for you.”

Only by now there was no longer any “they”. The bulk of the group had gone on ahead with the other officers, and the crowd had dispersed. Only Takashi remained, rooted in the same spot, wordlessly looking at him behind Keith’s back.

“Go,” he tells Keith, as much as he was telling himself. They let go of each other and he makes himself walk out of Takashi’s piercing line of sight with as little of a limp as possible.

He knew he wasn’t convincing anybody when two medics rush up to him with a stretcher not even after he’s taken five steps away.

* * *

 

They bandaged him up and gave him a bunch of pills, telling him to sleep it off and expect a fever, but to not worry otherwise. He was drowsy after the shots they’d given him, but didn’t want to take up a hospital bed when there were so many others in far worse conditions than him. A senior officer visits him personally and gives him a key to a room in the Garrison, and he was too tired to argue. He makes his way there and finds the layout nearly identical to the old one he used to have, with the only difference being the bed: one instead of the original two and generously double in its width. He dry swallows his pills, collapses onto one side of it and passes out completely.

* * *

 

He comes to eventually; the medicine having provided him exactly eight hours of dreamless sleep. He feels more rested than he had in a long time, which was how he deduces quickly that something wasn’t all right with his room. There isn’t a gun under the pillow next to him, and the sunlight was hitting him from the wrong direction.

He recalls details from the previous day slowly, such as that he’s not in his own apartment, but in the Garrison barracks.

He also realizes he’s not alone in the room – there’s somebody treading barefoot across the floor, almost but not quite soundless in their movements. Maybe it’s Sam or Keith, coming by to check up on him, but he shoots those ideas down just as quickly as he thought of them. Regardless of how he was doing, those two wouldn’t just trespass into his private sleeping quarters.

A calloused hand presses against his forehead to check his temperature, and by this point Adam knows who it is. The identity of the other person couldn’t possibly be anyone else but him. The intimacy of the gesture takes him back to happier times in the past, and before he could think better of it his hand had moved to catch this other person’s wrist, securing it in a tight hold, lest they could slip away again.

 _He_ doesn’t make any attempt to pull away. But Adam takes his time to open his eyes. He might have caught the ghost, but he had a powerful phobia the spectre simply dissolving away in his hand - part of the larger problem he'd developed over the last 6 years, unable to distinguish between his wants and his reality.

The tension inside him boils over and his eyes snap open finally, on full alert. The forlorn, anxious expression sitting on Takashi’s face doesn’t help in the slightest. Neither did his white hair, his white tank top, the white sheets of the bed and the morning sunlight outlining him in a soft glow that made him looked ethereal… and transparent. Last but not least, the fact that Adam wasn’t wearing his glasses. 

He shouldn’t have, and he’s over-reacting for sure. But he kicks his legs out around Takashi’s torso and twists the arm attached to the wrist he was holding to spin him, such that his back knocks flat against Adam’s abdomen, and he entire upper body is pinned by Adam’s crossed legs. Adam tightens the vice grip he has on the wrist as his other hand puts his glasses onto his face. 

“Ow,” Takashi grunts. The back of his head is resting against Adam’s pounding heart. He wants to yank the curtains so that everything wouldn’t be so bright, and for Takashi to look less ridiculously illuminated, but he doesn’t dare to take his eyes off him for a single second. The phobia is still there, still valid, still possible. Before, his pride would never have let him reach out to Shiro first after a fight, and neither would Shiro; they would have given each other the cold shoulder for a week. It was pretty ridiculous, for men their caliber and age. But this is a different time. He tightens his legs over Takashi’s chest and decides to say something first and get a response out of this man. The more he got to hear Takashi’s voice, the more material he would be, so Adam says: 

“I could _kill_ you.”

The words that came out of his mouth wouldn’t have surprised anybody who knew him, least of all Takashi, but it was the tone that was shocking even to himself. It sounded like sharp broken glass. Could he blame it on the medication, or having just come out of sleep? Takashi is staring at him with those old, _old_ eyes, like he’s looking past Adam’s physical body and searching for whatever dark thing that was on the inside. He’s so focused on staring him back, scrutinizing his face for all the changes it’d went through, he doesn’t notice when Takashi’s left arm reaches up around to gently cup the back of his head.

He flinches, not out of surprise, but because it brings to his attention the missing right arm; to the horrible scar slashed across his face; and whatever reason that had turned his entire head of hair white – it hadn't escaped his notice that the rest of the younger Paladins looked more or less the same – and his heart breaks all over again. He lets go of Takashi before their faces could get any closer and pulls away with a heaving chest, rolling and setting his legs on the floor. He hurt and he worried. But he was proud and he was angry, too.

Fired up, fuming at both Takashi and his own ego, Adam gets off the bed. He’s on his way to marching out the door when his ankle injury sends him a reminder, the pain flaring all the way past his hips, triggering as well the injury in his left ribcage. He punches the wall and keeps his balance, glaring at the arm that Takashi had brought up to catch him as well as the puppy dog eyes that were being beamed his way.

Catching his drift, Takashi moves his arm into a surrender pose, and kindly tells him “Careful. You have two fractured ribs on your left side.”

He glares even harder, if only because his leg still wasn’t ready for further movement and he knew, with every passing second that he remained immobile, that Takashi was emboldening himself to do something unbearable, like pull him back down onto the bed, or hug him,

“Adam?”

Or call his name in a small, quiet voice. He continues to steel himself, harden his resolve to remain upright and unfazed.

“Please?”

Please what? The fire reaches his face and his cheeks burn, his ears burn, his eyes burn, and he fights himself to keep his eyelids from blinking. His self-control is good, and so with nowhere else to go, the tear simply leaks out of his eye and streaks down the left side of his face.

Takashi’s face crumples like he’d taken a physical blow, and just as Adam is redirecting the anger inwards for losing his nerve, Takashi’s only hand closes over his right wrist. His only hand. And he says,

“I owe you an apology.”

Well, god damn. Adam waits, but the direction this conversation was taking? Coupled with this gossamer aura that had enveloped the room?  

“I’m sorry, Adam.” 

It’s a dream. Takashi Shirogane never apologized, he went out of his way to curve around those situations. This person on the bed? He must be some kind of clone. Sam had mentioned it in passing as a completely legitimate piece of alien tech.

This stranger, still holding on to his wrist, he gets off the bed and gets directly inside Adam’s personal space like he had the all the right to. The ghost is catching him. He steps out of the ray of light and into the shadows where he solidifies, gaining definition and clarity around his edges. He kisses Adam, soft and gentle like a lucid dream, and it overwhelms him. They’re in a bubble detached from time and space, on a reality that couldn’t possibly be true; he’s backed by memories he couldn’t remember, clinging to the shell of a man that’s he's mourned for six years as _gone_ , worst than dead.

He kisses a ghost, and the kiss itself becomes a ghost. It transcends ordinary memory and will go on to haunt him for days, years, time to come. He still can’t quite bring himself to believe all that was happening, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> "No one really knows much of Adam, which is why this is the only window to hyphothesize head cannons about this mysterious “significant other” before August 10 comes around." 
> 
> ^ That author's note and 95% of this story was written on the 22nd of July. I hadn't intended to publish it because I didn't like how I might have gone overboard and conceptualised Adam very differently from his then-unrevealed portrayal in S7. Now that I've finished S7, this fic is also ready for the world.
> 
>  
> 
> _(Mnq026 - by S U R V I V E)_


End file.
